High Bloods (18 page)

“Just a rakehell gambler who got lucky at the Gold Spur
Casino tonight. Call me ‘Reef,’ doll. Because I’m feeling flush, we got ourselves married up in the casino’s wedding chapel, and now we’re—”

“I don’t have a ring. I can’t feel married without a ring.”

I turned the Rover north onto Coldwater Canyon, then took a well-worn plush ring box from a pocket of the suit jacket and handed it to her.

Beatrice opened the box slowly, as women are apt to do.

“Omigod! That stone must be ten carats.”

“About that. You’re looking at my mother’s wedding ring, angel.”

“Omigod! And you want me to wear it? That’ll make me giddy, all right.”

“If you put Pym’s ring on your own finger, it’s Let’s Pretend. If I put it on, that’ll be for keeps.”

Bea took a very long breath and wiped under one eye with a finger. She took another long breath.

“You haven’t told me where we’re going and why we’re pretending.”

“Forty-two thirteen West Burbank Boulevard. Angeltowne Livery and Exotic Car Rentals. Open twenty-four hours. Reef and Honeychile are looking for something stylish to drive up the coast on their honeymoon.”

“Honeychile?” Her lip curled. “Okay, can we get serious? The real reason is—”

“I’m there to have a look around while you provide a diversion.”

“You’re on the job.”

“Right.”

“What is the job?”

“When Reef don’t have much else to go on, Reef goes with his gut, doll.”

“Would you
stop?
Why Angeltowne Livery? I know that Artie occasionally rented one of their limos.”

“Yeah. They have white for weddings, black for funerals. And even a couple of purple ones as homage to Elvis. Old-time Lincoln Continentals sawed and stretched. I’m sure it was one of those Lincolns the greasers who tried to throw me under the truck scrammed in when their play didn’t develop. Reef is still kind of chapped about that.”

“There are a lot of limo places, and some of them may have purple ones.”

“The last time I saw Sunny Chagrin she was able to say only a few words to me. She was dying and she knew it and she had to make the words count. Two of them were ‘Angel Town.’ Sunny could have meant Angeltowne Livery. And she may have found or seen something there that got her killed. Anyway, it’s a place to start.”

“I understand,” Beatrice said in a subdued tone. “And we could be killed too.”

“I’m not risking your life. Maybe it’s just a blocked trail and I won’t learn anything. But you’re not going to be in there for more than five minutes.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll need more time to look around.”

Bea crossed her arms and settled a little lower in her seat.

“I have a chill,” she said faintly. “Would you turn down the air conditioner?”

Angeltowne Livery occupied a block with one diagonal side to it, a two-story stucco building. Their location was convenient to the movie studios where they probably did a sizable business renting out their antique cars to period productions awash in sentiment and nostalgia.

At 2
A.M.
the showroom was brightly lighted; a crew was waxing and dusting an assortment of elegant automobiles: a 1956 Thunderbird, a pink tailfin Caddy, a Stutz Blackhawk. All of the
window spaces on the second floor had been filled in and painted over.

I drove around the building before settling on a place to leave the Rover. They were busy in the back, where a courtyard surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with the obligatory razor wire protected a compound of limos. I saw a gleaming bale of the deadly wire sitting in the bed of a pickup truck outfitted with chromed pipes and handholds and a rack of off-roader lights. The truck had the bulky tires and shocks necessary for desert rambling.

A car carrier was being unloaded, half a dozen vehicles from the late 1940s—the beginning of an era on the drop-edge of an abyss of time, before anyone had fully realized what was in store for humanity. The big worry back then was the Bomb, which now seemed quaint. Man had made his peace with the atom. Any political redhot who wanted a big bang could have one, but so what? The true assassins were everywhere, as we drifted to extinction in the final season of our blood.

The returned cars were driven into the garage beneath the building. There was a guard on the gate, another patrolling the lot with a pair of Rottweilers and a burp gun slung across his chest. I counted four surveillance cameras.

While we were idling along a big Harley zoomed up from the hive of the garage and turned into the street behind us. The Harley headed west into North Hollywood. The biker looked like a Diamondbacker.

I found a parking spot on a lighted section of the diagonal side street half a block north of the livery. I opened the flask filled with Boodles that I had brought from the house and basted my whiskery chin, then added a few drops of gin to my shirt collar.

“Excuse me,” I said to Beatrice. I gargled with the stuff, then spat it through an empty window.

Bea stared at me and pitched her voice higher, whining a little.

“Now, Reef! Baby, don’t you think you’ve had about enough?”

“Hell, we just got married! Gettin’ on my case already? I can drink more liquor than a freight train can haul! Now let’s go grab ourselves a hunk set of wheels. I feel like flyin’ tonighttt!”

With our act established I pocketed the flask. We strolled down to Burbank Boulevard hand in hand. Opposite Angeltowne Livery on the wide street there was a collection of low, drab-looking buildings housing businesses that were seedy, second-rate, or out-of-date. Chinese takeout. Dry cleaning. Porn books and collector DVDs. A gas station on the corner was closed. There was a yellow van partly visible behind it.

We went through a glass door marked
RENTAL OFFICE
and up a couple of steps. The agent stuck with the graveyard shift was, according to the plaque on his desk, T. Hollingsworth Sibley. He was watching TV. He had narrow shoulders, a hairpiece he might have borrowed from a poodle, and the disgruntled expression of a man who knows the joke is always on him.

His mood didn’t improve when I leaned over his desk and breathed on him.

“Mr. Sibley, the little woman and me—she’s been the ‘litle woman’ for, what is it now, a whole hour and a half, darlin’?” Bea simpered prettily. “Give Sib here a gander at your rock.”

Bea flashed the diamond for him, posing this way and that with the toothy élan of a low-rent movie starlet. Then she turned and gawked at the cars on the showroom floor.

“The little woman and me are about to depart on our honeymoon, as you might have guessed,” I said with a randy leer.

“Well, congrat—” Sibley murmured halfheartedly.

“Oh my gawdd, Reef! Have you ever seen more beautiful cars in your life? They are so
hot
. What’s that red convertible there called? That’s the one I want! Can you get it for us, baby?”

Sibley’s thin eyebrows knitted in consternation. But before he could move from behind his desk to head us off I had Bea
around the waist and was walking her into the showroom, managing to be a little unsteady on my feet.

“Uh, just a moment, please?”

Bea smiled at him over her shoulder. “Oh, he’s okay. Reef’s just celebrated a little too much. But I can drive just fine. I hardly ever touch a drop myself. Even though my first two husbands were slaves to the bottle.”

“You never told me about two other husbands! Where the hell’s this news coming from all of a sudden?”

“Oh, Reef. I was only a
kid
then. Tige and Randolph hardly count at all! They were just
practice
husbands. You’re the only one I have ever really truly loved, and it’ll be
forever
, baby. Now don’t you sulk.”

“I’ll sulk if I want to!”

One of the Hispanic women in coveralls who were polishing the rolling stock looked up with a smirk. I dug out my flask and tippled.

Sibley said, “Oh, now, we can’t have that! I must ask you—”

“Reef, you are going to give Mr. Sibley the impression we’re not responsible people to rent to!”

Sibley undoubtedly had decided that already. I reinforced the bad impression I was making by gagging, then spraying gin on the windshield of a candy-apple-red Chevrolet Mako Shark II, such a beautiful machine that desecrating it was almost enough to give me guilt spasms.

Sibley sprang to the rescue with his own initialed handkerchief before either of the cleaning women could respond. He gave me a hateful look. I spat up a little more. Sibley pointed wildly down a hallway.

“Not here! First door on your right!”

“Oh, Reef!” Beatrice wailed. “Are you sick? Was it all that sushi?”

I nodded and stumbled away toward the bathrooms.
LADIES
and
GENTS
side by side. There were two other doors. The one at
the end of the hall had a sign that read
GARAGE—EMPLOYEES ONLY
. The other one, next to the men’s room, had no ID. Both doors required card key access.

I glanced back as Bea was carrying on, doing a good job of distracting or entertaining everyone. I ducked into the ladies’.

On the terrace at Valdemar as she lay dying Sunny had tried to guide me precisely to where she wanted me to go:
dead drop
, she had said, then:
handicap
.

The bathroom stall designed for wheelchairs. At least that’s how I had it figured. Sunny had left something in there for future retrieval because someone might have made her and she knew her chances of walking out of Angeltowne Livery with whatever it was, borrowed or copied, were not all that good.

The ladies’ was deserted. There were no cameras, although the showroom was lousy with them. It was a reputable business after all, at least on the surface. Employees could get used to being watched anywhere else but not on the john.

I closed the door of the big stall behind me. No need to look around. There was no tank for the toilet. I kneeled and felt around the bottom of the bowl. Something was stuck to the porcelain there. So I got down on my back and had a look.

Sunny had left me a card key, fastened to the porcelain with two corn plasters she probably found in her purse. I pulled it free, flushed the plasters, and got up, shrugging the kinks out of my neck and shoulders.

I heard Bea even before I cracked the door to the hall an inch. She was bawling, on Reef’s case as Sibley tried to shush her. She felt so humiliated, sobbed Beatrice. Maybe she’d made a mistake after all. Men who drank might be fun for a while, but in the end they meant heartbreak. When would she ever learn?

Bea had maneuvered Sibley so that his back was to the hall. She had a hand on his arm in case he tried to look my way. She would keep it up for another minute or so, then her humiliation
would get the best of her and she would leave in a final cloudburst of tears and wait for me in the Rover.

I slipped out of the ladies’, tried the card key in the lock of the door next to the bathroom and got a green light. I went in fast and the door closed on Bea’s squall of suffering. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

I went two at a time up a flight of stairs to a second-floor hall where a couple of fluorescent bulbs needed to be changed: they flickered and buzzed. There were offices or cubicles along the right side of the long hall. Most of the doors stood open. Nothing to hide. A big one-way window was set into the middle of the left-side wall. It overlooked the garage two floors below. Mechanics were at work. The zip-buzz of power wrenches. I saw choppers worth twenty thousand or better and several Diamondbackers working on them. Four more members of the Brotherhood were playing hold ‘em and drinking beer from quart bottles in a brightly lit lounge area ringed with vending machines.

One of the players looked like El Gordo.

(So Angeltowne Livery was also a clubhouse for Diamondbackers. Was that what you wanted me to know, Sunny?)

I wasn’t satisfied. I prowled the length of the hall and came to the last two doors. One was marked
SECURITY
. The other could have been an exit door with stairs beyond, but it also required a card key.

I put my ear to the first of the doors and listened. A faint hum of computers inside. I used my card key and the lock clicked open. So it was probably a master key that Sunny had left me, with access to any part of the building.

I peeked inside. One wall was all monitor screens for the surveillance cameras. A guy in a khaki uniform had his feet on a desk amid paper plates and cartons of Chinese. He was snoring softly.

I didn’t go in, but I spent a little time looking at the monitors. I saw Bea leave the showroom downstairs and walk quickly along Burbank. I saw a basement area apart from the garage big enough to hold a couple of armored trucks. Nobody was there. And I saw a small, empty room with a narrow bed in it, nothing on the bed but a mattress. The walls appeared to be padded. There was a table, a molded plastic chair, a washbasin, and a lidless commode.

Furnished like a holding cell, but soundproofed. No clue as to where this room might be. But I wanted a closer look, if I could find it.

I left the surveillance room and the snoozing guard and opened the last door. Beyond it was a flight of stairs going down and another hallway along the east side of the building. More locked doors, which I opened one by one. Finding nothing of interest until I came to a chilly room in which there were six restaurant-sized stainless steel refrigerators. Each contained a hundred or so 500 cc bags filled with what appeared to be blood.

The door opposite the blood bank had a small window, about eight inches square, at eye level. I looked in at the cell-like soundproofed room I had seen on the surveillance monitor. What light there was came from the overhead fluorescent fixture in the hall.

I unlocked the door and went in. The window in the door was one-way from the hall. The air inside was stale but there was a faint linger of woman-odor, a mix of bodily effluvia: of skin and glands, of perfume and lotions, the merest trace one out of a few thousand noses might detect. I picked up the residue quickly. If a man had occupied this room for any length of time the air would’ve had a sharper, rye, rancid smell to me.